The Promise of Technoscience

Abstract

Cyberspace has become routine; you can shop there, organise your social life, your financial life, even your working life. Globally, the web is the workplace for many people, offering seemingly multiple possibilities for changes in employment and entrepreneurship, yet these same possibilities are also perniciously exploited through cyberspace in the interests of international capital. The advent of the internet and web-based technologies is one of the most marked transformations in our lives. I-Sophie grew to adulthood in this world, whereas I-Kath didn’t have a mobile phone or an e-mail address until she was in her forties (although she has been making up for the earlier lack ever since). Such developments have accelerated in recent years and currently the average age for getting a first mobile phone is eight. Taken-for-granted communications technologies have had an impact on lived experience and on embodied experience and appear to present a trajectory of change that is understood as progress. One of the aims of this book is to challenge such straightforward narratives of progress, or indeed the assumption that current technological advances can be seen to mark a rupture with a less knowing past. There is a clear analogy between the narratives of technological progress and the presentation of feminist histories as a similar trajectory of development from a naïve past to a more knowing present.